March 2, 2006 AT 10:16 am

PCB business card

A nice fellow came by the lab today and gave me his business card.

When I asked what the grid of holes were about, he replied “that’s the prototyping area.”
How f’ing hardcore is that?

He was also wearing a binary LED watch he built, cast in a chunk of solid acrylic, with capacitive touch sensors for the UI.
Thanks to the internet, I have found visual proof of this device (ripped from www.chicagoreader.com/pdf/050722/050722_ot_srilanka.pdf)

I hereby resolve to put more magic crystals and rainbows in my projects. Thanks, Todd!

5 Comments

The watch is a bit chunky for my tastes, but the guy is kind of cute. Might be fun to put together a more petite version of the watch, but you might have to do away with the touch-sensors, which would be a pity. It’s got kind of a retro-TV computer quality to it. Like, remember IRA, the commputer from the Wonder Woman TV series? It also kind of reminds me of a control box I put into a neutral buoyancy robot, once — only that was embedded in silicone, rather than acrylic.

That’s pretty nifty. Is he doing the capacitive touch-sensing by using the PIC16 to directly measure the time to charge up the touch pads, or with some kind of LC circuit, or what? I heard that capacitive touch sensors on tiny devices, especially ones worn on your body, were kind of tricky, but I haven’t tried building them myself yet.

i knew i’d seen this idea before somewhere, and i found out where .. on my desk i have two business cards from PCB vendors, also with on-board circuit and trace – http://www.europrint.be & http://www.jlp.de – so if any of you gen-4 geeks wanna tag along, just hit these guys up for some samples ..